How do I stop my ships from decloaking?

posted on May 12th, 2012, 1:34 pm

I've had this game for quite a bit now, and I have played against some friends before.
Not as often as I liked though, so I thought I should probably try improve my micromanagement skills a bit.
But there is one thing is starting to drive me insane.

One ship takes damage so I move it away and cloak it.
I reselect my remaining group so I'm not giving orders to the ship that is supposed to run.
Doesn't matter. The ship that I just ordered to run just uncloaks and gets whacked. 

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

posted on May 12th, 2012, 2:51 pm

Yes order it to repair imediatly after cloaking then it will follow its original order so long as you reasign it to a new fleet thats how i micro manage.

For example my fleet is fleet 1.
1 ship is taking heavy damage so cloak repair assign it to fleet 2.
Keep pwning.

posted on May 12th, 2012, 3:24 pm

Interesting. I did try to assign repairing ships their own fleet numbers a few times, but often I was just too lazy and simply reselected the remaining group with my mouse.
Maybe the ship autonomy didn't like it's fleet mates getting harrassed and that's why it uncloaked again.
Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a shot.

[Tyler]

posted on May 12th, 2012, 4:12 pm

Last edited by Tyler on May 12th, 2012, 4:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I select Repair, then Cloak it, then select Pirority Repair (Shift+R, I believe). That way, It's already moving away from the enemy when it's it drops any shields that might have recovered and ignores everything until reaching the Yard (when it feels like it).

[oberlerchner123]

posted on May 12th, 2012, 5:51 pm

Last edited by oberlerchner123 on May 12th, 2012, 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That helped quite a lot, thank you both.

I still wonder why ships sometimes seam to decloak without me telling them to.
At least they don't do it while priority repair is set though!

posted on May 12th, 2012, 5:58 pm

priority repair can still be cancelled by certain things so don't count on it 100%

by far the biggest cause of mishaps are replaceweapons, which will make a ship forget everything. ie when a rhienn comes down from phase plates, it will forget orders.

cover fire will do the same. so watch these ships closely.

posted on May 12th, 2012, 10:11 pm

Actually this particular bug was introduced a few patches ago, when the Devs were working on ways to make the AI keep its fleets together more instead of engaging with one half and running with the other.  I think it's already been fixed in the next patch, although we never heard back from the Devs on the status of this problem.

posted on May 12th, 2012, 11:41 pm

Actually no, this bug was not introduced "a few patches ago" - it's a classic, brought to you by our very own Armada II 

[Tryptic]

posted on May 13th, 2012, 4:36 am

Last edited by Tryptic on May 13th, 2012, 4:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Really? I remember reading about AI tweaking in the patch notes once, and then it happened to me for the first time.  Maybe I just wasn't noticing before then.

I wonder what it would take to fix it.  I'm guessing that part of the engine isn't very easy to get into?

posted on May 13th, 2012, 5:32 am

Yes, most people don't notice these bugs unless they are actively looking for issues. It's also easy to blame issues like these on other common actions, so spotting them can be tricky.

Unit AI is tied into most aspects of, well, unit usage and thus it is hard to fully understand repercussions of tweaking. It's a very important to-do topic, but sadly remains quite difficult to alter incrementally. However, next patch nonetheless features a number of fixes in this arena that smooth out several ancient grouping bugs .